Little Snitch: Network monitor gains more control with new beta

Little Snitch is a utility that squeals on apps that try to connect to the …

Objective Development has a great concept with Little Snitch: Mac OS X comes with a solid firewall built in and most of its ports turned off out of the box, but it doesn't really have any decent tools for monitoring and throttling your Mac's outbound traffic. Little Snitch solves this problem by acting as a highly configurable toll booth, allowing you to set very specific rules to govern which kinds of outbound traffic can be sent by your applications. Want to deny Firefox access to port 80 and force it to only use https (port 443)? Or perhaps you would simply like to be notified whenever any of your applications make any kind of request on your network or the web? Little Snitch's watchful eye might just be the thing for you, and the new features in the version 2.0 beta should make it even more appealing.

As if its all this customizability isn't enough already, Objective Development is focusing on providing even more control over behavior and network visualization with this new version. Little Snitch's UI has received a complete overhaul, offering tools to search and filter rules and a new Network Monitor to watch network traffic in real time. The connection alerts—one of my pet peeves about Little Snitch—are also getting a boost with keyboard shortcuts that should make it easier to allow or deny traffic on a per-connection basis. My peeve stems largely from the fact that, by default, Little Snitch seems to deny just about any connection from an app you haven't set up custom rules for. For example: While drafting this post, I received an alert from Little Snitch when clicking on a link in NetNewsWire, my favorite RSS reader. While I can understand this caution given Little Snitch's purpose in life, I still wish there was some sort of UI for managing or adding batches of rules that allow connections from, say, apps that are currently running.

Minor gripes like that aside, however, Little Snitch is a popular app in the community of power users and network administrators who need to know about every piece of chatter emanating from their Mac(s). Demos of both versions 1 and 2 are available, and the only limitation is that Little Snitch will quit after 3 hours of use. Single licenses are $24.95, and a Family Licenses is available for up to 5 computers in the same household for $48. Bundle seats are also available beginning at 5 for $100. Once shipped, Little Snitch 2 will be a free upgrade for users who purchased after February 15, 2007.